Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Donnie Finds a Relic

While sledding in the junkyard, Donatello notices Raphael
has something lodged in his shell.
Donnie pries it loose and finds that it’s an unlabeled audio cassette
tape. He spends the next few days
agonizing over a way to play it, but none of his machines can read
cassettes and building a tape player is a lot more complicated than he
thought. Donnie fears that the cassette,
being from the analog age, may contain some form of wisdom that has not yet
been uploaded to the cloud and, if not transferred to a digital medium, might
be lost forever.

Sensing Donnie’s distress, April heads to a pawn shop to
buy a boom box. She trades an old record
needle for it, but as she leaves, she’s accosted by a unit of Foot Soldiers. April beats the stuffing out of them and
returns to the sewer to present Donnie with the boom box.

As it happens, the tape contained a demo track from a
circa 1987 indie rock band called Coco and the Pebbles. They never hit it big or released any albums
and so that tape is one of the only recordings of their music in
existence. The Turtles, April and even
Splinter then get down to the hot licks.
Unbeknownst to Raph, he has a hard disk lodged in his shell…

I do love stories that revolve the outdated technology of
my generation. It’s low hanging fruit
and an easy way to please me, but I don’t care.
I think my favorite episode of Cowboy Bebop is the one where the
characters spend half an hour trying to find a Beta player only to end up with
a VHS. I'm an easy mark for that shit.

“Donnie Finds a Relic” is maybe a little ahead of its
time, at least regarding the difficulty to obtain cassette players. Donnie laments that the technology has been
rendered antique and is now unobtainable while the boom box April finds in the
pawn shop is priced in accordance with such rarity. I’m pretty sure we aren’t quite there yet in
regards to the scarcity of cassette players, but hey, maybe in another 5 or 6
years.

But I think the story might be intended more as a
reflection of the child audience this comic is aimed at, who have never had to coexist
with tape decks and VHS players. To
them, such technology IS lost to the sands of time and thus unobtainable,
so I suppose it comes down to perspective.

Otherwise, the story is fairly straight forward. I liked that Grace used human Foot Soldiers
instead of the robotic Footbots which the cartoon has switched over to on a fulltime
basis. It’s always a pleasure to see
some season one elements crop up when every other Nick TMNT outlet has moved on
past them.

Grace’s art has that intentionally “rough” look in both
the pencils and the coloring. It's that “deliberately
sketchy” aesthetic where background lines are left half-finished and the colors
“miss spots” like they were haphazardly applied in quick brush strokes. It’s a popular trend among indie artists,
though perhaps getting so popular it’s losing its appeal.

Anyway, like a lot of these guest back-up strips, “neat” pretty
much sums it up, but I’m glad to be getting these things.